A ‘Period Dignity Officer’ Seemed Like a Good Idea. Until a Man Was Named.
The first time I met my neighbor, it wasn’t my own.
All I knew about him was that he lived about 20 minutes away from me, in an apartment complex. I knew, from the way the lights were coming on and the people were leaving, that he was home, and that he wasn’t home on the weekends, either.
It took a few months to understand that he was not merely a neighbor; he was a fellow family member to a friend of mine. I met my neighbor through this friend, and to hear my neighbor tell it, their family was in a similar place – except, in my neighbor’s case, the man’s wife was still unmarried and the man was single still.
I felt a kind of kinship with my neighbor’s story. I understood how the loss of a relationship, and being lost in it, can make you feel alone and a lot of the time, not just lonely, but sad.
I also felt something else; I felt that there was a window of opportunity to reach out to my neighbor and, when I knew him a bit more (over coffee, once), that I could, maybe, find out a bit more about my neighbor, how he came to be where he was, how he got in (or out?) of a relationship with his wife, how he got into a relationship with this friend and how they were both single and in this position.
Because I like my neighbor and because I believed a lot of what he shared with me about his life, including his past, I took the risk. He reached out to me. We had a couple of meetings which, while they were nice, went nowhere.
At the time his wife was still at work and we could not meet without her, but, after a decent amount of time had passed, I said I would email him. He did too. I heard from him a couple of months later. We agreed to meet up to chat and perhaps talk about some things that had been bothering him. We met and talked for a